Volume Control
by vodka straight
Summary: He was amazed by how instantly and easily he could feel her volume.


Title: Volume Control  
  
Set around: *IMPORTANT*: post 'The Fall's Gonna Kill You.'  
  
Pairing: Josh/Joey   
  
Joey did what she was supposed to and got onto a plane. She went to work. Three months later, when things had calmed down, she came back.   
  
This time, he picked her up at the airport.   
  
Josh took her back to his apartment and tried to seem tired but wasn't at all. After she came in she shut the door behind her. She had waved off her translator at the airport and he'd taken a cab to their hotel.   
  
She shut that door and turned around and looked at Josh, and he was struck by how instantly and easily he could *feel* her volume.   
  
There was no awkward invitation to have a drink, no worriment about voicing a reason to cross the ten or fifteen feet that separated them in the half-lit hallway. There was no one saying, "turn on a light". There was no one proposing to go up to his room. But, at the same time, it was all *there*.   
  
The idea of a drink was rejected because it was cold and simulated.   
  
The reason to cross the ten or fifteen feet was a simple magnetic heat, and every person's need for motion.   
  
The need for the light on was a kind of sick warmth, curiosity and perversion.  
  
The idea to go up to his room was a sexual tick in the bottom of their stomachs, like the two of them were attached to the same string, and someone was tugging on it. It was a pulse. It was a steady and it was a desperate pulse.  
  
Joey reached up to unbutton Josh's shirt, and he caught her hand. It was strong looking, pale and over-worked; clear, short fingernails, hard and unbitten, and the effect was like a bird, like something fluid and wise and simple, like something more poetic than red lips against white sheets.  
  
She removed her hand from his grip, looking as though she might be laughing, and stripped his shirt off him quickly. Her kisses were strange. They had a force like a steady pressure, a feeling of security, of persistence and power. Her pale hands ran the inside of his waistband, along the edge of his hips, over the small swell of his stomach.   
  
She was patient.  
  
She was cool and utterly controlled.   
  
He could feel every slide of her pants against his hips, every slip of her unbuttoned silk blouse, and the unexpected catch of her skin against his stomach.  
  
Her body was amazing. Joey Lucus's nakedness was effortless. Her smoothness, her liquid strength; the flawless roundness of her hips, the lightly defined muscles in her arms.  
  
Joey was naked against the blinded window, the stripes of light spreading over her skin like fine powder. She lay on top of him.  
  
She moved with a confidence he had never known.   
  
When women spoke during sex Josh usually enjoyed it. It built him up, made him feel like the two of them were getting their money's worth, as it were. He even enjoyed the silly cliché of name-calling sometimes. He thought it added to the excitement.  
  
But as he lay there underneath Joey Lucus's powerfully shifting hips (underneath was another thing he didn't do often), he realized that he had never had it this way before.   
  
The silence was not strained. It made the act seemed even more earnest, and it left off the silly front of pretense. Her breath was audible but not vocal. It was a heavy but not over-worked. Her hands didn't clutch the pillow, nor did they run through his hair, but they braced themselves on the mattress and bent as she moved her hips one way or the other. Her face was calm, lips parted and slightly smiling, eyes closed.   
  
When she came it was only a half-second before Josh did. Her hands tightened on the mattress and she froze. Her mouth opened slightly and she pushed her hips forward slowly and strongly one last time, and only now was there a sound: a wonderful, thick, female groan that seemed to push itself all the way up from her chest. Her hands slackened, and she exhaled a long, happy breath right as Josh finished his orgasm. Josh was loud, but it didn't matter. All she saw was his eyebrows lift and his eyes close and his mouth open slightly as she felt the odd release of his body into hers. Then she rolled off of him.   
  
Josh lay back against the mattress as Joey stood up and walked naked to the bathroom, without glancing back at him once.   
  
Later, after she was dressed and ready to go, she lay down on the bed next to him. She looked at him like he was so confusing; so interesting and so amusing and misguided.   
  
"You trusted me." She says.  
  
Josh's face was blank. "Yes. Of course I did."  
  
Joey frowned more deeply, her smooth forehead creased and her head tilted to the side, making her look almost sad. Then she said something that Josh couldn't understand. He frowned and pointed to his ear.  
  
"I'm sorry?" he asked.  
  
"We're not real people, are we?" she enunciated, indicating the two of them. Josh leaned back on the bed.   
  
"I don't ...?" he said.  
  
Again she spoke inaudibly. He shook his head and indicated his ear again. Joey sighed heavily and reached across him onto the nightstand, where they kept the pen and paper for emergencies. She wrote studiously for a moment in her scribbling, unisex hand, and delivered the note to Josh. He read it aloud.  
  
"'We're just extensions of things.'"   
  
He let the words sink into the air around them even though he knew she couldn't hear a thing. He watched the paper and not her perfect brown eyes. He nodded.  
  
"That's the way democracy is supposed to work." He said, looking down at the paper.   
  
"Josh." Joey said.   
  
He thought clearly and looked up so that she could see the workings of his lips. He looked up so that she could magically discern his meaning from all the other crap floating around in him, the wit and the cute accessories that come with self-pronounced brilliance.  
  
Repeating things for her always made him feel so guilty.  
  
"I said, 'Yes. We are.'" He said.  
  
Joey looked unsure, but nodded. "We shouldn't do things like this." She said carefully.  
  
"No. We should not." Josh agreed. 'Because we're not real people,' he thought, 'and someone who isn't real shouldn't play with this kind of fire. Someone who isn't real isn't going to feel it when they catch on flame.'  
  
Joey wrote carefully on her paper again, using her curved leg as a hard surface and frowning. She handed him the note and he read it to himself.  
  
'If you and I were real, I would love you.'   
  
Josh nodded, watching the paper. "I think I do anyway."   
  
"Joshua." Joey's patient voice was like warm water that made him float. He looked up, enunciating carefully and choosing his words as he went.  
  
"I would, too." He said. 


End file.
